Liz Lee (left) and her brother, Eugene Butler were reunited by chance at a skilled nursing home in Perris after being separated for 50 years. PHOTO BY PETER SUROWSKI

By the time Liz Lee realized her older brother, Eugene Butler, no longer lived with her family, she had no idea where he went and no way to track him down.

“I had written him off,” she said.

Lee, a Perris resident, last saw her brother 50 years ago miles away in Los Angeles; That’s why the 59-year-old certified occupational therapy assistant was shocked to realize one of her patients at Centinela Grand Healthcare in Perris was her long lost brother.

“Of all the places he could have wound up, and so far from home,” she said with a sense of awe.

Lee — whose maiden name is Elizabeth Butler — was 9 years old and living with her aunt in Los Angeles County when she last saw her brother, who is three years older than her and has a mental disability that requires him to have constant care.

After their parents gave them up when Lee was about a year old, she, Butler and their five other siblings moved from their home in Hamilton County, Ohio, to their grandparents’ home in Los Angeles.

When their grandparents passed away several years later, the seven children split up to live in the homes of three aunts. Eugene went with an aunt in South Central and Lee and her older sister, Mildred, went to an aunt in Compton.

Lee faintly remembers that around that time her brother, who has the cognitive ability of a young child, was having a hard time adjusting to the loss of his grandfather and life in his new home.

“He was really close to our grandfather. They loved fishing and hunting,” Lee recalled. “When our grandfather died, that’s when things get worse for him.”

At some point, Butler’s aunt gave him up — to a halfway house, to a foster home, she said she was never sure — and as Lee grew up, she never thought to ask about him.

“I was a teenager. I was adjusting to and dealing with my own life,” she said.

By the time she thought to check in on her brother, the aunt who had cared for him had passed away, and none of their siblings knew where he was.

“I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t,” Lee said.

In the following years, Liz got married, entered the occupational therapy field, bought a house in Perris and has worked at several facilities in Riverside County, settling into her job at Centinela Grand about three years ago.

When Butler moved into the facility earlier this month, he struck Lee as looking familiar.

“I looked and him and said, ‘Oh, a new patient,’ but then I thought, ‘Oh, he looks a little familiar,'” she said.

She assumed he was a resident who lived there before — she has seen many people come and go — but then something caught her eye that made her pause.

“I saw his name plate and I said, ‘I have a brother with that name,'” she said.

She walked into his room and asked him some open-ended questions about his family.

“I said, ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?'” Lee recalled, and he answered, “Howard.”

Howard was the name of their only brother.

This made her wonder whether this was her lost brother, but she wasn’t convinced.

Butler, whose speech is often difficult to understand — he often repeats just one word quickly many times, did not answer any more questions that day, so she came back the next day and asked the same question.